Although Courier was never an official Microsoft
product, the design and concept behind the dual-screen hinged tablet garnered a
lot of enthusiasm. (Note: Sonyis
expected to launcha tablet with a similar form factor in the near future.)

Pioneer Studios' Seattle office closed a year
after J Allard, a former top designer at Microsoft credited with founding
Pioneer, left the company. Pioneer cofounder, George Petschnigg, is now listed
as an "entrepreneur" working on an "undisclosed new venture"
on his LinkedIn profile. He was instrumental in securing $20 million in
development funding for the now dead Courier. According to a PC World, he is now at Microsoft's
Startup Business Group.

Other Pioneer Studios employees have also
reportedly left the company or have joined other groups, notably the Startup
Business Group.

In addition to Pioneer, Microsoft has a number of
other incubation groups, including FUSE Labs, the Garage, and the Hardware
Incubation Lab.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

No kidding. The amount that Microsoft spends in R&D is astronomical. That they have so few shipping products outside of operating systems and office software, with an even lower number of successful ones, to show for it is bizarre. It is a vision problem and it comes from the top.

What? You must be kidding, MS has so many products and services that they will be around for generations. They make the fricking software that makes ALL other software for crying out loud (Visual Studio). Seriously we could make a list of 100 very successful products that make them boatloads of money. I mean, MS owns the business world hands down - and that's where the REAL money is at. Calm down folks, MS isn't going anywhere.

And I could go on and on and on. Not to mention all of the software and products that go alongside all of the above. They are everywhere.

The Courier was a cool concept but that's about all that it was. It would have been impossible to power both screens on battery life for more than a few hours, they would have had to build an entire OS just for this one product, the hardware to run both of these screens wasn't mature enough at the time (and still may not be), and the cost of the dual screens would have raised the price well above acceptable cost levels.

Are you high? Since when IIS is a fuckin standalone product? Or ASP.NET? These are supporting technologies, pretty much only introduced to make sure they will not use existing open source products (classic scumbag MS approach.)

MS has almost NOTHING to show for its R&D budget - you listed exactly what he said: beyond OS and Office there's barely anything to show. FYI Xbox is not even marketed like Microsoft but as Xbox - they know very well their name is tainted...

It IS Ballmer, this bald, dumb, arrogant fat prick - his utterly clueless about anything beyond using a mouse, a classic stupid bean-counter, nothing else.